Your Face 你的臉 Ni de lian

"As I searched the streets of Taipei for faces to film, some verses began to appear in my mind. I wrote them down:

There is some light, there is a story.
Your face tells of the passage of time and places you have journeyed.
In your eyes, there is a tinge of confusion and sadness. There is some light, there is a story.
Your face tells of love and the places it hides in.
In your eyes, there is a sparkle and some darkness.

This is the meaning of the film."
(Tsai Ming-Liang)

"A face is a landscape of expressions, experiences and of the imprints of time. Tsai Ming-Liang has searched Taipei's streets to find faces that tell a story. In a minimalist, but all the more engaging framing of unbroken close-ups, the Taiwanese filmmaker lets some of the selected people tell their life stories, while others just stare back at us in silence or simply fall asleep along the way. The result is unique. The variation in the smallest details of the motif is, like in Tsai's other works, the key to an experience that is difficult to express in words, but is infinitely generous in its immediate presence. The portrait film Your Face is more than just the portrait of some of the people you catch a glimpse of on the street and then never see again. Time itself is the protagonist in all of Tsai's films, including this one. The fact that it can at the same time be seen as an ironic commentary of the most overused of all documentary clichés - talking heads! - can be read as a commentary on the fact that the eyes that look are also free to draw their own conclusions."
(CPH:DOX)